She smell checks almost every ingredient and never tastes. Best cat. Then she smells the end product and we’re both like ‘that’s that done, then’.
My cat doesn’t care for people food, but she does paw at my arm until she gets to smell my breath when I’m eating. Our routine is for me to take a bite, open my mouth and breathe at her, and then she sniffs and walks away.
Not to make them feel included, but to kill their curiosity. I always offer a smell of my food to my cat and then take it away. She gets to smell it and realize it’s something she isn’t interested in. I think that’s the reason she doesn’t bother people while they’re eating. She knows she isn’t interested in “people food.”
She gets to smell it and realize it’s something she isn’t interested in.
We have had very different cats then.
I’ve never had a cat that wants people food, and I think it’s because of just showing them what it is and then taking it away.
My last cat was food-obsessed. I would do the “show, sniff, remove” thing and it would work depending on the food. But many foods only needed a fraction of a second for her to know she needed it in her mouth right now. If you took it before her attempt to eat it, you met the response of “hey, I wasn’t done with that!” and the paw would come out to bring your hand back.
For roast chicken you would have to actively defend your plate the entire meal. She would sit next to you and very slowly try to “sneak” her paw on to your plate to take what she could. As though I wasn’t watching her like a hawk and she had some kind of cloak of invisibility.
I miss my round dinner thief.
Not to make them feel included, but to kill their curiosity.
That’s how she feels included. Even if you don’t mean it that way, that’s how she sees it. She’s important enough that you care what she thinks. That’s good cat parenting.
I do this too. But of course some cat like some or most people food more than others. My cat eats ranch dressing, eggs, dairy, and oils. She’ll eat a few meats too. But she is mostly uninterested in human food, so I fulfill her curiosity often because it’s kind to my cat and it helps stave off her desire to beg. I also thinks she just trusts me more and is more fond of me because I engage with her in her interests a lot. Hell, that’s just good advice for raising children too.
My dog all of the time. Anything I think he’ll find interesting. But especially if he’s been curiously watching me with the item. Dogs love inspecting new things.
I have to show my cats all sorts of stuff, bolts, tools, gamepads, pens. They’re incredibly nosy, not curious, as that kills cats, just nosy and inquisitive.
Every time I’m holding something and my dog thinks it’s food I let her smell it and then she’s like “oh ok I’m not interested then”
